The last spike, and other railroad stories

by Cy Warman

Henry was proud of his rapid promotion, especially this last lift, that would enable him to race in the moonlight along the steel trail, though he recalled that it had cost him his first little white lie.

One of the rules of the road said a man must be twenty-one years old before he could handle a locomotive. Henry knew his book well, but he knew also that the railroad needed his service and that he needed the job; so when the clerk had taken his "Personal Record,"—which was only a mild way of asking where he would have his body sent in case he met the fate so common at that time on a new line in a new country,—he gave his age as twenty, hoping the master-mechanic would allow him a year for good behavior.

Years passed. So did the Indian and the buffalo. The railway reached out across the Great American Desert. The border became blurred and was rubbed out. The desert was dotted with homes. Towns began to grow up about the water-tanks and to bud and blow on the treeless plain.

Henry Hautman became known as the coolest and most daring driver on the road. He was a good engineer and a good citizen. He owned his home; and while his pay was not what an engineer draws to-day for the same run made in half the time, it was sufficient unto the day, his requirements, and his wife's taste.

Only one thing troubled him. He had bought a big farm not far from Chicago, for which he was paying out of his savings. If he kept well, as he had done all his life, three years more on the Limited would let him out. Then he could retire a year ahead of time, and settle down in comfort on the farm and watch the trains go by.

It would be his salvation, this farm by the roadside; for the very thought of surrendering the "La Salle" to another was wormwood and gall to Henry. It never occurred to him to quit and go over to the N.W. or the P.D. & Q., where they had no age limit for engineers. No man ever thought of leaving the service of the Chicago, Milwaukee & Wildwood. The road was one of the finest, and as for the run,—well, they used to say, "Drive the Wildwood Limited and die." Henry had driven it for a decade and had not died. When he looked himself over he declared he was the best man, physically, on the line. But there was the law in the Book of Rules,—the Bible of the C.M. & W.,—and no man might go beyond the limit set for the retirement of engine-drivers; and Henry Hautman, the favorite of the "old man," would take his medicine. They were a loyal lot on the Milwaukee in those days. Superintendent Van Law declared them clannish. "Kick a man," said he, "in St. Paul, and his friends will feel the shock in the lower Mississippi."

Time winged on, and as often as Christmas came it reminded the old engineer that he was one year nearer his last trip; for his mother, now sleeping in the far West, had taught him to believe that he had come to her on Christmas Eve.

How the world had aged in threescore years! Sometimes at night he had wild dreams of his last day on the freight wagon, of the endless reaches of waving wild grass, of bands of buffalo racing away toward the setting sun, a wild deer drinking at a running stream, and one lone Indian on the crest of a distant dune, dark, ominous, awful. Sometimes, from his high seat at the front of the Limited, he caught the flash of a field fire and remembered the burning wagons in the wilderness.

But the wilderness was no more, and Henry knew that the world's greatest civilizer, the locomotive, had been the pioneer in all this great work of peopling the plains. The pathfinders, the real heroes of the Anglo-Saxon race, had fought their way from the Missouri River to the sundown sea. He recalled how they used to watch for the one opposing passenger train. Now they flashed by his window as the mile-posts flashed in the early days, for the line had been double-tracked so that the electric-lighted hotels on wheels passed up and down regardless of opposing trains. All these changes had been wrought in a single generation; and Henry felt that he had contributed, according to his light, to the great work.

But the more he pondered the perfection of the service, the comfort of travel, the magnificence of the Wildwood Limited, the more he dreaded the day when he must take his little personal effects from the cab of the La Salle and say good-bye to her, to the road, and hardest of all, to the "old man," as they called the master-mechanic.